


Courage

by zorilleerrant



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment, Islamophobia, Person of Color Hermione Granger, Racism, but not black Hermione, shows basically everyone in a bad light
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-09
Updated: 2017-01-09
Packaged: 2018-09-16 01:14:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9267212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zorilleerrant/pseuds/zorilleerrant
Summary: Being different is nothing new to Hermione.





	

The first time Hermione hears the word ‘mudblood’, she doesn’t hear the word ‘mudblood’. Oh, the sounds reach her ears just fine, they line themselves up neat and orderly in front of the blackboard of her mind’s eye, English phonemes and English phonotactics and English prosody ringing through the language centers of her brain, familiar enough that she can map it out against a word she’s read in so many books at a layer of remove. It’s clinical the way she parses it, the way she decides to be annoyed, the way she labels them bigots and makes a note to avoid them when she can, housemates or no.

What she _hears_ though, in the way they say it under their breaths, looking around furtively, grins somewhere between a sneer and a grimace, in the way the tone rises at the end like the speaker isn’t sure how to say it, how loud to say it, how harsh to say it, the way the word crescendos like it has to be said anyway, in the nervous guilty laughter, in the smug jut of the jaw, in the emphasis, the cadence, the diction, and the timing, is ‘paki’.

And she runs for the first bathroom she can find.

 

It’s the Slytherins Hermione expects to be the worst. After all, they’re who she’s been warned against, by everyone from the nice professor who came to her house to explain magic to her parents to the good friend of the famous boy she’s read about in all her textbooks. They’re bigots, everyone says, in no uncertain terms, though when she asks someone to explain, it’s almost always couched in uncomfortable euphemisms.

Purist. Traditional. Closed-minded. Judgmental, self-righteous, unfair.

Hermione’s heard those words before. She knows what they mean. They mean that if you act angry enough, you never have to fix anything. They mean that if you can point to someone worse, you needn’t look at yourself. They mean that if you just don’t talk about the hurt, it’ll go away, because words cause feelings, not the other way around. They mean that if you never discuss those heinous, horrible ideas, everyone will automatically sense which ones are bad, and no one will ever believe in them again.

They mean shut your mouth if you have nothing nice to say about it.

But she knows bigots, and she knows crowds, and she knows it’s always much nicer to surround yourself with the smugly progressive than the confidently backwards looking, and, anyway, Gryffindor’s where there are more people like her.

Mudbloods like her. Not pakis like her. But something to soften the blow, at least.

Hermione sometimes forgets that worst is always modified by proximity.

 

There are four other girls in Hermione’s year, in Gryffindor. She’d rather make friends close to home, because there’s a sort of solidarity in a house, and also a sort of shaming that goes on if anyone talks to someone outside the group.

Hermione knows about that. The gifted group at her old school stopped talking to her for a week when she tried to join the students of color organization.

They’re nice girls, Hermione thinks. Only they keep calling Parvati ‘Pav’ like it’s too hard to say it out, despite the fact that they get Hermione right on day two. Hermione doesn’t like that. She thinks Parvati is a perfectly straightforward name and not hard to say, and a pretty name at that, much better than her own, which Hermione has never much liked.

The fact that her parents explicitly picked it so she wouldn’t have to deal with people pretending they couldn’t pronounce it has absolutely nothing to do with it at all.

Parvati, Hermione calls one day, waving hello to her roommate.

Parvati raises an eyebrow and gives her a sneer and informs her that her name is Pav these days, and could Hermione please move because she’s preventing real witches from using all those spellbooks behind her.

Hermione almost lets out a squeak, but she doesn’t, because she’s been thrown out of libraries for causing less of a nuisance one too many times and she won’t let that color her Hogwarts career, even if she has something to say.

You know, Parvati clarifies, just in case Hermione missed the point, people who actually have a chance at being successful with magic. People who won’t have to play catch-up for their entire school career.

Lavender is less overt in the things she tells Hermione, more patronizing, always patting her on the head and stroking her hair. She’s not unkind, always, but, then, she’s not always with Parvati. Hermione thinks maybe Parvati has more to prove because the other mudbloods and half-bloods don’t give her her due as easily, not with that skin and that hair and the jewelry she dons, her clothes and even some of her spells. Hermione knows about being the wrong color and having something to prove.

Hermione wanted to learn the spells Parvati does in the dorm and only sort of in secret, away from the teachers but showing off to the other girls, which was maybe out of a sense of comradeship, maybe just because she knows they’ll never be taught at school. Now she thinks maybe she’d rather not, after all.

The other two girls are half-bloods and avoid even saying hello in the halls, just in case anybody thinks they’re like Hermione.

 

Neville, Hermione thinks, is exactly the kind of nice her parents warned her about. He’s mostly shy, and keeps to himself, but when he does bother to interact with the rest of them – Pav and Lav excluded – he does that sort of thing.

That sort of thing like opening doors for Hermione, or pulling out her chair, and giving her that smile and slight shake of the head. That sort of thing like speaking slowly to her and to Dean, especially when they’re together, overenunciating his words and pausing between them. That sort of thing like reminding Hermione what they’ve been learning in class every lesson she’s shared with him. He seems to like them, to think himself clever for offering a hand to the less fortunate about the school. Well, until someone accuses him of liking Hermione, anyway.

After that, it’s clear Neville only has room for one token low blood friend.

 

Hermione wonders what it is about Dean that makes him more acceptable, if he’s the right kind of wrong or there’s the benefit of the doubt or just that he’s a boy. She knows how self-congratulatory Neville feels. She never got that sense from Seamus, not with him being half-blood himself, but maybe that’s why. Sometimes the half-bloods seem to want to claw their way up, sometimes they seem to think they’re just as much at the bottom as everyone else, although Seamus hasn’t yet spelled out for Hermione that he’s got it just…as…bad…as…her,…kitten.

Hermione’s yet to see Seamus get quite the same looks or words or corrections on his assignments, but then, Seamus doesn’t just have the right mum, he has the right skin and the right clothes and the right supplies. But he doesn’t really pay attention to her, either, almost seems to forget she exists when she’s not talking directly to him. She’s never seen the sneer, or the glare, or the lascivious smirk, but she’s seen the surprise, even shock, when she appears, and she’s seen it again the second she says something in English, more when she says something in Latin, even Latin they’ve just learned in class. Seamus has the right outlooks to fit in, too.

He has the wrong accent, but Dean’s the only one to comment about that, and only Harry laughs, and no one else understands, so they stop pretty quickly. Well, Seamus understands, she has to assume, but even the half-blood girls in her year are fairly sheltered from realities of muggle life, and don’t see what accent has to do with it. Hermione wants to share a laugh with Dean, but he avoids her in a way the others don’t, even though he talked to her, at first, for days, maybe even weeks, even though he’s just like her, dark with dirty blood.

Hermione wishes she could stop thinking about blood status all the time.

Dean has it out for her now, though, has little jabs about her eating habits or how she doesn’t meet people’s eyes, nasty questions about why she isn’t wearing a veil, what that means for her purity, what that means for her prospects, what she means to be doing to his country, because he may be dark, but at least he isn’t one of those. Once, he pulls a little book from her bag and rips it to shreds, to the laughter of a few other muggle-raised students in their year.

Hermione cries, because that book was an out of print Greek-Latin dictionary, and it was hard to find, and she doesn’t suppose her parents can navigate a magic shop to get her a new one.

 

Finch-Fletchley is the worst. Hermione sounds out the other houses eventually, because they can’t all be as bad as all that, and she starts with Hufflepuff, because everyone knows they’re the friendliest. After he manages to insult her religion, parents, hair, body, intelligence, social skills, and poverty in just a few sentences, all with that sincere smile plastered around his exacting vowels, Hermione gives up on making friends altogether.

 

A Gryffindor pushes her down the stairs.

 

A group of Ravenclaws spells her library books so they go blank every time she tries to read them.

 

A pack of Hufflepuffs corners her after flying practice, taking her dirty clothes along with her clean ones while she’s in the shower.

 

A Slytherin, she thinks, keeps spelling bacon onto her plate, but she can’t tell if it’s someone mean making racist assumptions or someone nice making ethnocentric ones.

 

In fact, aside from disdainful looks and the matter of fact suggestion that Hermione and her whole family be killed, the Slytherins really haven’t done anything to her. She knows that house would be a bad choice, because she would be murdered in her sleep, but at least she would know why. And, come to think of it, maybe she wouldn’t even be, because it’s all sort of academic with them, and none of them seem to take the least personal interest, like they think even Hermione agrees with them, because why wouldn’t she really.

It’s sort of comforting to Hermione that Malfoy hates her because her magic is wrong and Crabbe and Goyle hate her because Malfoy does. It’s immensely satisfying that Parkinson hates her teeth and Davis hates her fashion sense and Bulstrode hates her low-class penmanship. Hermione can get behind that, because she worries about her teeth and her clothes and her handwriting, because more often than not she feels like her magic really is wrong, somehow, that she’s missing something intuitive to everyone else, that maybe she oughtn’t be here after all. And sometimes she’s angry because they want to push her around, and sometimes she’s happy to be part of the crowd, because they treat at least half the student body that way.

Most times, it’s such a shock to her, even hearing the same insult over and over again, that she chokes on her comebacks, trying to laugh and coughing and gasping until she cries.

Happy tears, Hermione supposes.

 

Harry and Ron are nice to her, though, or as nice as Hermione can reasonably hope for. Harry understands, sort of, because he never knew about magic, either, and he was his school’s whipping boy. Ron understands, too, sort of, because he’s always been poor and he’s always been youngest and it’s not the same, but he knows what it is to be left out. Hermione’s never known what it was like to have not, but she’s been called it enough times to know exactly what her friends mean when they talk about the pitying looks that are never quite motive to step in.

Harry confesses, late one night, that his aunt and uncle complained about her kind all the time, and he feels a sort of vicious glee in undermining them. Ron doesn’t care over much about her blood or her skin, simply tries to look down her shirts or up her skirts or hug her just a little too tightly, sit just a little too close.

Harry’s smug about liking her, but not the way most people are, and it’s kind of exciting for Hermione to play the bad girl. She’s been called _bad_ before, but hardly ever a _girl_ , just a _them_ or a _bitch_ or a _whore_. And bad girl, in Harry’s book, doesn’t mean taking over his country or destroying his culture or trying to convert him; it means late nights and sneaking around and getting into trouble of a normal schoolkid sort, and Harry knows exactly what Hermione means about just being normal kids for once.

Ron definitely thinks Hermione is a girl, and she can feel her muscles tense and her heartbeat speed up and her breath come in shallow gasps when he’s near. She never knows what to say. That’s love, she supposes.

Harry and Ron respect her for her mind, though; they trust her notes more than their own, they’ll believe her research over theirs any day. They like the way she rewrites their essays, and the way she corrects their homework, and the way she sets out guidelines for review. They’re busy, so she doesn’t always see them when tests are coming up, but they always thank her for her schedules anyway. They always bribe her with books or sweets for her help.

Hermione figures she’ll take what she can get.


End file.
